Detecting Proteins has become faster

A team of McGill University scientists have come up with a new technology to streamline the analysis of proteins. This will offer quick, high volume and cheaper solutions to hospitals and laboratories in this process.

Despite thousands of proteins in our body, the variety of protein tests can target one kind at a time. Proteins are key information providers to doctors, clinicians and scientists. It can denote if a chest pain is due to gastric issues or cardiac arrest. Prof. David Juncker, PhD scholar Milad Daghner and other colleagues from the Department of Biomedical Engineering in McGill University were able to find a technique to assess hundreds of proteins in a single blood sample.

It is a way to barcode micro-beads using multi-coloured fluorescent dyes that enables detection of markers in parallel from the same solution. Then a cytometer counts the proteins that stick to the multi-coloured beads. The new algorithm generates different colours of microbeads with greater accuracy.